I predict California gets gay marriage within the next 10 years, realistically within 6. 18-29 year olds voted against this 61-39 while the 65+ voted for prop 8 61-39. Everyone in between was about mixed. I think young people realize gays marrying does not effect them in any way whatsoever and if you look at the 18-24 vote they voted something like 64-36 no. The trend is definitely the younger you are, the more you are comfortable with gay rights. I see no reason why it should change.
As younger people marry and have families their views on what a real marriage and family is will form.
That's not the issue though. This is about rights that are extended from the state. I think it would be wrong to give gays the same rights as marriage but call it something different. That smacks of inequality. Also it's not as if churches are going to be forced to marry gays, and that probably won't even be an issue as there are already churches that perform gay marriages.
I've injected my opinion on this in threads before, but it seems appropriate to add it here as well.
Marriage affects two categories of activities that involve government. The broadest set of activities involve activities that I will call transferable rights. These are activities like power of attorney and inheritance that anyone could assign to another by filling out the appropriate paperwork. There are hundreds of these minor civil rights, and civil marriage bundles all of them into a single piece of paper, essentially cutting out the bureaucracy of assigning each of these separately.
The second category involves specific entitlement benefits. These benefits would not normally be accessible to an arbitrary individual, even if both persons wanted it to happen. For instance a person who is entitled to survivor benefits from a pension plan or family heath insurance coverage cannot not go to the clerk's office and designate an arbitrary person to be the recipient of these entitlements. However, marriage automatically creates that designation for many benefits.
I see no problem with extending activities in the first category to any couple that so desires. I think that civil union would ideally be just that - a one-stop process to identify a person to be the default for all the transferable powers of the kind I mentioned. Opposite sex marriage already has loopholes that have been exploited to gain entitlements from that second group. I don't think it makes sense to open more loopholes to gain entitlements by extending civil marriage to arbitrary couples.
Couldn't be said any better.
Marriage already has its problems, why create more with gay marriages.
